There’s a devastating debt bomb lurking inside the Royal Mail takeover

The potential for asset sales should be a genuine concern too. Both Royal Mail shareholders and experts believe Kretinsky could be getting his hands on one of the biggest corporate property portfolios in Europe – an estate of prime sites situated in towns up and down the country – on the cheap.

The CoStar commercial property website points out that the buildings are in the sort of locations highly prized by the so-called “last-mile” delivery companies, and it is for this reason that they could be dramatically undervalued.

Developers are also likely to spy rich pickings. In 2011, the Royal Mail offloaded a 2.3-acre site in London’s West End for £120m, which it then temporarily leased back as a sorting office. Six years later the redeveloped site was sold for £435m.

Whenever he has been pressed about whether this deal is in the national interest, Jeremy Hunt talks disingenuously about the need for Britain to be open to foreign investment.

But real foreign investment, such as the £2.5bn Microsoft plans to spend on AI data centres in London and Cardiff, is not the same as a heavily debt-financed takeover of a critical national asset by a self-interested private equity tycoon.

To conflate the two is to take us all for fools.